Sizing

What Size Dumpster Do I Need? An Honest Longview Guide

Most sizing guides lead with cubic yards. That is the least useful number, because almost nobody can estimate their own debris in cubic yards. Here is how we actually do it on the phone.

Why cubic yards is the wrong question

Every dumpster sizing guide opens the same way: a 10 yard holds ten cubic yards, a 20 yard holds twenty. True, and almost completely useless, because nobody standing in their garage looking at thirty years of accumulated stuff can convert that into cubic yards.

What we actually ask on the phone is three questions. What are you throwing away? How much of it, in terms you can picture — pickup loads, rooms, squares of roof? And where is it going to sit? Those three answers get us to the right container about ninety-five percent of the time, and everything after that is about weight.

There is a useful local yardstick too. The City of Longview bulky item service caps a collection at eight cubic yards, which the city itself describes as about two small pickup loads. If your pile is bigger than two pickup loads, you are already past what one bulky collection will take.

The two constraints: volume and weight

Every container has two limits and you will hit one of them first. Volume is the obvious one: the box is only so big and you cannot legally load above the top rail. Weight is the one people forget, and it is the one that costs money.

Each size comes with an included tonnage. A 10 yard typically includes one to two tons, a 30 yard four to five. Go over and you pay a per-ton overage rate, which we quote before you book, so it is never a surprise — but it is still money you did not need to spend.

What each size really holds

10 yard — 12 ft × 8 ft × 3.5 ft

Three to four pickup loads. One to two tons included. The small-job container and, more importantly, the heavy material container. A bathroom gut. A patio slab. Broken concrete, brick, tile. Low three-and-a-half-foot sides mean you can throw material over the wall without a ramp, which matters when you are handling broken slab by hand.

15 yard — 16 ft × 8 ft × 4 ft

Five to six pickup loads. Two to three tons. The most under-used size in the industry and frequently the right one in the older parts of Longview, Kilgore and Gladewater, where boom-era lots have narrow drives that will not take anything longer.

20 yard — 22 ft × 8 ft × 4.5 ft

Seven to eight pickup loads. Three to four tons. Our most popular container by a wide margin, because it covers the three most common real-world projects: a shingle re-roof, a full kitchen renovation, and a three-bedroom whole-house clear-out.

30 yard — 22 ft × 8 ft × 6 ft

Ten to twelve pickup loads. Four to five tons. Same footprint as the 20 with eighteen more inches of height, so it holds half again as much without needing any more driveway. The builder's container, and the right call for a barn teardown or a pine coming down.

Worked examples from real East Texas jobs

The weight traps around here

Concrete, block and brick

Roughly 4,000 pounds per cubic yard. A single cubic yard of broken slab weighs about as much as a small car. This is why we will not put concrete in anything larger than a 10 yard.

Boom-era building material

The 1930s and 1940s housing across Kilgore, Gladewater and older Longview is dense: old-growth lumber cut heavier than anything milled today, plaster, cast iron. A 15 yard filled with that can hit its weight allowance at half volume. Tell us roughly when the house was built and we will size for weight rather than for rooms.

Rocks and dirt

Extremely heavy, and worth flagging because the city will not take them at all — rocks and dirt are on the excluded list for city collection. If you have landscaping spoil, a small container is the only route, and it goes in a 10 yard part-filled.

Anything that has been rained on

East Texas is humid and it rains properly. An open container left through a wet week gains real weight you pay for by the ton. If the load is already dense, keep it covered.

Pine is its own problem

We are in the Piney Woods, and pine behaves differently from almost anything else you will put in a container.

It does not stack. Limbs trap enormous amounts of air, so a pile that looks like it would fill a pickup routinely needs a 20 yard. A single mature pine coming down will often need a 20 or 30 yard on its own, which surprises people every time.

Two things nearly double what fits. Cut to four-foot lengths rather than throwing whole limbs in — and that length is worth remembering anyway, because it matches how the city wants bundled brush prepared. And load deliberately, filling the gaps rather than building a lattice.

Green pine is also heavy with water. If you can let a pile dry for a few days before the container arrives, do.

Two smaller containers vs one big one

On larger jobs this is frequently the cheaper route, and almost nobody asks about it.

Disposal is priced by stream. Mixed construction and demolition debris costs more per ton than clean concrete. Clean vegetation has its own route entirely — the city runs a compost site for exactly that material. Scrap metal is sometimes worth money rather than costing it.

So on a property clearance producing concrete, clean timber, metal sheeting and general debris, two or three containers will very often cost less in total than one mixed 30 yard, even after paying for the extra movements.

The test is whether you have enough of a clean stream to justify a dedicated container. Half a container of clean concrete, yes. A wheelbarrow full, no.

How to describe your job on the phone

• What the material is. "Kitchen cabinets, countertop, appliances and about 200 square feet of tile floor" tells us everything.
• Roughly how much. Rooms, squares of roof, or pickup loads.
• Roughly when the house was built. Boom-era material is much denser than post-war.
• Where it is going, the drive surface, and the length.
• Low branches. We need about twenty-two feet of clear height to raise the truck bed, and in this part of the world that is our single most common constraint.

That is a ninety-second conversation and it is the difference between a flat rate that holds and an estimate that moves. Call and describe the job — we will size it honestly, including telling you when a smaller and cheaper container is the right answer, or when the city's own services would cover it for nothing.